Films need festivals: All films seek exposure and, for many films, festivals are among the few available platforms that give such exposure. Yet, the festival circuit is a platform that is insufficiently explored and remains poorly understood.

Festivals need films: Having come into existence once, film festivals have an insatiable need for new content. Festivals depend on films for their own survival, threading the fine line between opulence and obscurity.

Work published in this series will improve the understanding of the way film travels through the festival circuit. It seeks to highlight and untangle the dialectics of the two. Conceptually, the project is based on notions of transnationalism and dialogism. It will pay attention to peripheral yet significant phenomena and will bring about new insights by breaking down the concept of a single festival circuit into many smaller self-contained yet interlocking clusters.

The series will seek to capture the dynamics of global film festivals. It will be comprehensive in its geographical coverage, with examples not only from the West but also stretching as far as Latin America and Africa and acknowledging the key importance of Asia. It will seek to analyze the reasons for the proliferation of film festivals in some cultural contexts as opposed to their restrained advancement in others. It will seek to show the range of stakeholders and forces that shape the film festival in relationship to tourism, cultural diplomacy or various activist causes. It will explore management and political aspects and the so-called economies of prestige. Last but not least, it will explore the relentless invasion of the digital forms of distribution and how they change the game.